Food Related

Recipes I Promised

April 10, 2020

The other night I made a pot roast in the crockpot, with a recipe many of you may already know, but for those who don't, it's pretty simple:

🍖 Crockpot Pot Roast🍲

1 packet of onion soup mix dry contents

4 oz of water

veggies of choice (room in crockpot permitting if desired)

beef roast (one that will fit in the crockpot)

Empty packet of onion soup mix in the bottom of the crockpot, add the veggies if any, and 4oz of water. Place roast on top, cover pot and cook on high for 4-6 hours (depending on desired doneness and size of roast).

When the roast is cooked, remove it and the veggies from the crockpot and stir in a little Veloutine brown mix until you reach the desired consistency for your gravy and serve over meat and veggies. 

We also made mashed potatoes to go with the dinner, but my veggie mix that I put in the crockpot was a mix of frozen chunks of parsnip, carrots and brussels sprouts (that I blanched from store bought and froze together as a "stew mix"). 

🍲Instant Pot Beef & Barley Soup🍲

Then to stretch it into further meals we each had a sandwich from the meat the following day.  Then I made a beef & barley soup in the instant pot.

I used: 

2 litres of beef broth

1 cup of finely chopped beef

1 cup of dried soup mix vegetables

1/2 cup of pearl barley

1 stalk of chopped celery

I put all of that into the instant pot on soup, for 40 minutes. When it was done and steam vented, I won't lie, it looked more like a porridge than a soup as the barley had absorbed all the liquid. My husband likes stuff like that and so he got into it head over heels and even though there were two huge containers (Coaticook 4 litre Ice Cream containers) full there's barely even 1 left now, even though it was made only last night. I found it rather thick (too thick really) and bland, so I added water for my bowl and had to add a lot of salt as well (something I shouldn't have). But hey if you are looking for ways of stretching 1 cup's worth of beef into something that will feed a family for a couple of meals at least, that'll do the trick. Just add water when reheating to serve and some preferred seasoning to taste, is all. 

🍌My Banana Bread🍞

Then to use up some bananas that were basically headed for the compost bin or just about - as the skins were black, but still edible and some of that buttermilk I still have left and is rapidly getting ready to go bad as well, I made my banana bread. A recipe I jerryrigged over the years because the orignal I started with was too dry and not banana-y enough for me. So I modified the original recipe I'd been using from the "The Settlement Cookbook" - an old recipe book given to me by my mother (which will come in quite handy now-a-days as it explains among other things how to make soap and candles etc from rendered fat and how to render the fat for those purposes).  

1 1/2 cups flour

2 t baking powder

1/2 t baking soda

1/2 salt

1/2 cup butter

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

3-4 over ripe bananas mashed or pureed

1/2 cup buttermilk

Sift flour, baking powder, soda & salt together. Cream butter with the sugar, add eggs, mashed bananas and milk alternately with the flour. When well blended pour into a greased & floured bread pan, and bake at 350F in a preheated oven, for an hour, until done or   a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.